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Insomnia

merylg

Senior Member
Messages
841
Location
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Maybe studies on Familial Fatal Insomnia will give some insight into insomnia in general. Maybe ME/CFS patients should have access to genetic testing for this condition.

It's interesting that some common drug treatments, tried in Familial Fatal Insomnia, do not help & are actually detrimental.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia

I personally am finding insomnia devastating.
 

merylg

Senior Member
Messages
841
Location
Sydney, NSW, Australia
"We now know that Fatal Familial Insomnia is a prion disease. The term prion was coined by Stanley Prusiner in the 1980s as the name for an infectious agent. Specifically, a prion is a mis-folded protein that permanently affects the structure of the brain. Prions are responsible for the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans.
fatal-insomnia.jpg
In FFI, prions eat away the thalamus region of the brain, responsible for regulating sleep and various sensory and motor systems. This increasingly prevents the sufferer from losing consciousness - although their EEG readings show signs associated with REM sleep during waking hours: they are so sleep deprived, they are dreaming while awake.

Because Fatal Familial Insomnia is genetic, there is a 50% chance of a parent passing it on to their offspring. The tragic thing is, the symptoms don't show until after the child-bearing years are over (typically over 40 years), so parents usually pass on the defective gene without realizing.
Fortunately, a diagnostic test is now available, but there is no known cure for FFI. The only hope is that gene therapy will offer a solution to future generations."

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/fatal-familial-insomnia.html